


what a metaphoric fall

by sleep_is_good_books_are_better



Series: Sig's Bad Things Happen Bingo (aka Torture Tekēhu Week) [2]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Canon-Divergent Lore, Complicated Relationships with Gods, Eothas aka the Best God, Falling Through Ice, Gen, Musings on Death, Self-Doubt, Self-Reflection, angst with a really cheesy ending if I'm being perfectly honest, mentions of family, or more accurately, pre-game, wait there's canon? lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 23:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18292115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleep_is_good_books_are_better/pseuds/sleep_is_good_books_are_better
Summary: "The gods send me visions from time to time," Yndira tells Calisca, as if the god Calisca's countrymen killed isn't the reason Yndira still lives to stand before her now.





	what a metaphoric fall

**Author's Note:**

> Funny story - I came up with most of Yndira's backstory and all of my headcanons about her life in the White that Wends before I realized that there's lore in-game about the Glamfellen, so I'm falling back on the old Bioware trick of waving away in-game lore as "well, there are different clans with different traditions..." 
> 
> One more thing: from here on out, Vatna is the glamfellen name for Ondra, and Odur is the glamfellen name for Eothas. Good? Good.

In the dark, the ice of the Lands melts into the black of the sky until it all looks like one void ready to swallow her whole. Belafa sits low in the heavens, a single thin crescent against the backdrop of countless tiny stars. To any outsider, this landscape of gray and black and slick ice would be a death trap, but Yndira feels no fear. She knows this path – she has walked it a hundred times with no difficulty. Tonight will be no different. There are small notches on the bottom of her feet, small chips of whale bone sown into her shoes that let her grip the ice, and anyway, it’s the end of winter. The ice is at its thickest.

(If she had paid attention to her papa’s warnings, she would have remembered that in the last week, the sun has peeked over the horizon for the first time in months. Even those dim rays will cause the ice to melt, just a bit, and then freeze again, leaving a landscape that looks firm but isn’t. But if she had paid attention to what her papa told her, she wouldn’t have been out in the Lands anyway.)

It only takes one wrong step, one foot placed half a pace to the left or to the right of where it usually goes. She jolts, first, as her left foot jerks slightly, and then she hears it. The tell-tale sound of ice cracking. Yndira suddenly freezes so still that she can feel her heart moving against her ribcage. Slowly, slowly now. She has to be careful. The sounds of ice splitting ring out in the dim light, and she can feel her lungs constricting with dread. She wants to leap back, to run, but she forces herself not to. Instead, she falls back, pulling all her weight to her right foot, but it doesn’t matter. The cracks are coming faster now, speeding towards her right foot like an orca after a seal. She lifts her left foot, trying to retreat onto safer ice, and that’s what does it. The group splits open beneath her right foot, and then she’s tumbling through the ice.

She tries to brace herself for cold water that doesn’t come. She just falls and falls and falls, into a gap in the ice that could be as deep as the glaciers are tall. She looks around wildly, trying to orient herself to one side of the gulley, but everything around her looks the same, all just walls of ice that look like liquid silver in the dark. And then she hits something, suddenly, violently. Pain like a hundred needle-sharp teeth biting down shoots up her right leg, which crumples beneath her like a lungs under a cracked ribcage. Her back hits the side of the gulley just as her tailbone slams into the ledge, pushing all of the air out of her chest. She gasps for breath, mouth gaping open like a fish, but it isn’t enough, and blackness starts to float before her eyes.

_This is it,_ she thinks. _This is the moment I die._

Then she slumps forward, and then she thinks nothing at all.

* * *

When next she wakes, she doesn’t know how much time has passed. She doesn’t know where she is beyond a thin lip of ice on the side of a gulley that could well be as deep as the moon.

For a moment, she just focuses on what she _does_ know: the Lands are treacherous. That is the first thing a young glamfellen is taught. Never trust the ground beneath your feet. It is not earth, after all, solid and strong and dependable. It is but frozen water, and it can be as unpredictable as the waves. Yndira always _was_ a poor listener. She is an _ísskuldur_ , after all. The ice should be hers to form and shape as she pleases.

Somewhere in this, she thinks, is a lesson about the dangers of thumbing your nose to Vatna.

She had only wanted a break. Is it too much to ask that one night in ten belong solely to her? Not to the family, not to the clan, but to her and her alone? She only wished for one evening with the cliffs and the waves.

Somewhere in this, she thinks, is a lesson about the dangers of wishing. 

It had only taken a moment. She remembers her grandmother, telling her in a voice warm with age, _the ice will take you, child, if you are not careful. Vatna’s sea gives us life, but she can take it away just as easily._ It had only taken one wrong step, picking her way back to the longhouses across the ice, and the ground had crumbled beneath her. Yndira gazes up at the thin strip of stars peeking through the top of the gulley. She is fortunate, she knows, that there was a gulley under the ice and not a sea, and that there was a ledge to catch her rather than an unending fall into darkness. She adjusts her seat against the walls of the crevasse, and her leg burns with white-hot needles. She is lucky to have only broken her leg, and not her spine.

She knows this. She _knows_ this.

Yes, fortunate indeed, some part of her thinks, small and bitter and petty. Hers shall be a slow death, then.

All around her, the grey, slick walls of the gulley tower above her, and for a moment, it feels as if they are falling inward, bending down to swallow her whole. She pushes her head back, somewhat desperately, everything in her aching to see the sky and the sea and the wind once more. As she tries to even out her breath, she begins counting what few glimmers of light she can see. Two, five, eleven, seventeen. The elders, they say the stars are Odur’s eyes. That is how he watches us, they say, even on the long night when his face is hidden for months. Yndira wonders if he is watching her now. She cannot see the moon. She rubs the bumps on her forehead, where her horns are beginning to emerge. At least Vatna will not see her shame.

Yndira wonders if perhaps she should pray, if not to Vatna then at least to Odur, whose ever-watchful eyes see all. Selka would tell her yes, would say that one should always trust in the gods in times of need, but if the gods are truly watching over the People, as the elders say, then why do some burn out with fever while others freeze to death? The ice at Yndira’s back has begun to melt with her body heat, soaking her furs. Small beads of cold have begun to march up her spine.

All her life, the ice masters and the elders and even her parents, they have all told Yndira that she is marked by the gods. Marked by the gods for what, she thinks, staring over the lip of the ledge to the darkness below. Marked to die in the dark and the cold?

Bending her head back once more, Yndira decides to count the stars again. It is better than thinking.

* * *

When Yndira next comes to, it’s to the sudden, burning revelation that she’s an idiot. Or, at the very least, that she’s really, really slow.

She’s sitting on _ice_. She’s in a gulley of _ice_. Practically everything she can see, excepting the gray haze the sky has become, is made of out of _ice_. She’s an _ísskuldhur_. Lifting herself out of this mess should be easy.

She takes a couple of deep breaths to focus before straightening her back. Her tailbone still aches dully from the impact, but its pain is nothing compared to the rest of her. The movement jolts her right leg, and the pained hiss of air through her teeth howls through the gulley like the wind. There’s some kind of throbbing sensation in her other leg as well, and barely risen sun sends enough light bouncing into the gorge for her to recognize the dark splotch under her thigh as blood. She must have gashed it open on the ice as she fell. She takes a few more deep breaths, trying to push past the pain, but as she does so, her back rubs against the frozen wall. The flat beads of cold on her spine have sharpened into burning pinpricks, a telltale sign that frostbite is beginning to sink in.

It’s a devastating reminder that she’s running out of time. She’s been mouthing at a piece of ice that chipped off into her hand as best she can in an effort to stay hydrated, but even under her muffler the cold air is beginning to bite at her chapped lips.

If she’s going to do anything, she needs to do it now.

She pulls her gloves off and presses her bare palms against the ice to either side of her. Closing her eyes, Yndira tries to match her breaths to the ebb and flow trapped inside every piece of ice, the tides and waves frozen in the cold. At first, there’s nothing, and without her prompting, her hands dig more firmly into the ice. Her head is spinning from the lack of food and water, but she pushes on, grasping, reaching, fighting-

There!

Suddenly, she can feel it, just a bit. It’s faint, but it’s there.

Master Hafren would deride her for working with so feeble a beacon, but what other choice does she have? She pictures herself wrapping vanishingly slight threads around her fingers, and then she _pulls_.

(Years later, when she is a better _ísskuldhur_ , when she is older and wiser and better able to understand her failings, she will see where she went wrong. She was too certain, too eager, too young. She tugged on a knot not fully tied, and it came undone in her hand.)

The ledge beneath her jerks, jolts, and then the sound of ice cracking echoes throughout the gulch. Yndira can’t be sure how much of the sound is real and how much is in her head, but in her mind’s eye, she can see the filaments wrapped around her fingers fraying into a million gleaming shards. The lip she’s sitting on shudders again, and her perch suddenly lists to one side. She can feel herself start to slide, start to _fall_ , and with her heart bounding a roaring beat in her ears to match the splitting of the ice, she makes up her mind.

She grabs what’s left of the bondlines, pools the shards in her palms, and thrusts them at the wall behind her. The ice beneath her groans once, twice more, before settling into place.

Her eyes snap open in time with her hands, spilling fragments of ice all around her. She stares at the wall of the gulley in front of her without seeing it. The ice around her slowly falls back into silence, but Yndira can barely make it out over her panting breath and her blood roaring in her ears. 

It would seem she has chosen a slow death after all.

* * *

 She doesn’t know how long she’s been down here. It feels like the long night, when the disk of the sun remains hidden under the horizon for months. Somewhere in the distant haze of her mind, she notes that it’s too early in the year. The sun still hangs too low in the sky for its light to make it down the gulley walls to where she now sits, so she can only mark the passage of time by the lightening of the sky and the faint glimmer of sunlight along the edges of the ice. The sun has come and gone and come again, but in the haze her mind has become, she’s lost track of how many times.

Her thoughts swim. At some point, the chip of ice fell out of her hand, and when she reached for another, she found her fingers had gone numb. She thinks she may have perhaps tried breaking a piece off using magic, but when she reached for the ice, she couldn’t tell its waves apart from the eddies inside her head. Or maybe she did nothing at all, and she simply dreamt of it.

She can’t remember anymore. She doesn’t see the point.

Even the burning of her back has stopped, leaving only a torpid, senseless mass. The thought floats through her mind that she can’t really see the point in anything anymore. Only ice, and the cold. Those are the only things that feel like anything anymore.

She promised she’d take Svana to watch the Hunt with her this year, she muses. Maybe someone else will take her, maybe Arluk or Thuri. Or maybe she won’t go at all.

Not once does the thought of rescue cross her mind. It would be foolish to risk so many lives to ensure the safety of one, even for a varsjel. No, there is no one coming for her.

A picture of her funeral floats through her mind. With the height of spring nearly upon them, the family will likely wait until then to pass her soul through the Beyond. Air huffs out of Yndira’s nose and past her peeling lips. She will be remembered on the same evenings as the hunters and elders who fed and guided the family. What an honor.

Her thoughts drift back to Svana, not even yet ten. In a decade, maybe two, how will she remember her sister who was lost to the ice? Or maybe Svana won’t remember her at all.

Yndira tilts her head back, so that she can see the sky. It’s getting lighter, the black of night lifting to the gray of dawn. In the stillness, she can feel her heart pumping in her chest. After all the excitement of her fall, it’s pace has slowed now, growing more and more still with her body.

She wants to close her eyes. She’s ready to not feel anything anymore.

* * *

 The sky grows lighter, and her eyes remain stubbornly open. She doesn’t know why. It seems foolish to her, this stupid, animal instinct for life. The nubs that will now never be horns feel dull on her forehead. She wanted an evening for herself, didn’t she? Perhaps now she will get a lifetime. The sky is yellow now, and still her chest doggedly rises and falls.

Why? She wants to scream the word into the sky but there is not enough air in her lungs. Why? Why was she born? Why here, why now? Why was she chosen? Why was she marked? What was she meant to do?

Her lips part, tongue slipping out to trace the peeling skin as she swallows against the desert in her mouth.

If this is truly to be her end, why can’t she just die?

There is a glint of sunlight sparkling off the ice at the top of the gulley, forcing Yndira to squint against the glare. Past the sheen, the sky is brighter than she’s seen it in months, a yellow so pale it’s practically white.

Then the sun rises a few inches higher, the angle becomes a few degrees steeper, and sunbeams spill into the gulch. Yndira tenses the muscles in her face, trying to close her eyes before the light blinds her, but she’s tired and hungry and thirsty and nothing in her body is moving fast enough.

The glare burns the sight out of her eyes. For a moment, everything hurts, and all before her is flat and hard and white.

And then she _sees_.

It is as if she is the sun. All of Eora lies unfurled beneath her. She sees countless lands with countless cites and countless kith, sees them leading their lives as if hers is not coming to an abrupt end. A heartbeat, and then there are fields of some kind of tall yellow grass, stretching as far as she can see, with folk tending to it as diligently as if it were their own children. The gleaming sunlight bleeds out of the sky to paint the tips of the grass a gold more vibrant than even the most precious of metals, and even though she does not know what it is called, Yndira knows that this grass is vital. It is alive. Then her vision blurs, and the golden waves are gone. In their place is a field of flowers, yellow petals spread around deep brown centers, pushing through the dirt to unfurl their faces towards the sun. The ground is pale from a lack of rain, but even still, Yndira can feel in her chest that these flowers will weather the drought. She can feel their roots digging into the earth as surely as if they are digging into her skin. Another jolt, and she is flying over the sea, a pod of whales below, watching as a mother brings her calf to the surface to breath.

(Somewhere, dimly, distantly, her fingers begin to tingle.)

She sees Odur, a goliath in hunter’s furs, striding through the sea. A mammoth hand reaches down and plucks a whale from the ocean’s blue depths, and in his palm, its form shimmers and melts into a ball of light as bright as the sun and as perfect as a star. She feels herself pulled closer and closer to the orb, but even as she draws nearer and the warmth of its light hits her cheeks, she doesn’t burn. Though she doesn’t have a body, she can feel it as she sets down upon Odur’s palm, so close to the orb that she could touch it, had she the arms to do so.

_Turn around_.

She will spend the next fifty years trying to remember the sound of her god’s voice.

(It will take the destruction of a keep on the other side of the world and a visit to death’s door before she ever hears it again.)

The light of Odur’s beacon falls on her back like the arms of a lover, and for a moment, the empty blue of the sky is so wide and unending as to take her breath away. Then she looks down, and what little air remains in her lungs flees in a rush. The white expanse of the Lands spreads out beneath her, practically glowing in the spring sun. Small villages and settlements dot the ice’s mottled surface. All around her are her people, carving a life for themselves out of the ice and the cold and the dark.

Even here, where winter’s icy reign would see the end of all things, life finds a way.

Her heartbeat roars in her ears, strong and sure. Air rushes past her lips as her chest pumps like bellows, but she feels no pain. Staring out over the whole of Eora, she is as certain as sunlight.

She _understands_.

She turns back to face Odur. _I understand_ , she wants to say. _I see_ , she wants to exclaim, as if it is the greatest epiphany since fire. The orb is gone, but its warmth remains, steady against the inside of her ribs. It slots between her lungs as if it belongs there, and for a moment Yndira wonders how she ever believed it wasn’t there.

(The heat in her chest drips down her spine and between her hips, and somewhere in the back of her mind, the bones of her leg begin to scrape together.)

Odur’s arm stretches out before her, and all of a sudden she has hands again. His face is high above her, buried in the clouds, but she doesn’t need an ending, only a beginning. She reaches her new-found hands in front of her and begins to climb. Odur is hot as flame, burning her when she touches him. Pain shrieks up her leg, and it threatens to crumple beneath her, but in her mind’s eye, she sees the flower again, it’s roots bending and curving but never breaking. Blood pounds in her ears. Even as the her right leg stabilizes, the back of her left thigh tears open. Yndira pictures her father’s bone knife, the ripping sound as it slides through hide, and the whoosh of the needle as it pulls the pieces back together. She’s cradled in Odur’s elbow now, the way ahead of her twice as steep as what’s behind her, and the winds are getting faster now, trying to slip their way under her fingers and pry her off. Once, twice, her grip slips, and she nearly falls. She can’t see the ocean any more, or the Lands; all that’s before her is white and fuzzy and hidden.

Still, she moves.

The higher she gets on the walls of the gulley, the stronger she feels, the more certain her step. Every time she reaches for the ice, she can feel it reaching back, and it is nothing to take what the frozen waves are offering her, to anchor her fingers in ropes of frost and pull herself along its surface. The sun is lower in the sky now, but that doesn’t matter. Its fading light pales in comparison to the sun she carries in her chest.

She’s at Odur’s shoulder when the vision breaks, and she wakes to find herself throwing a leg over the lip of the crevasse. For a moment, she lays there, completely still, feeling the cold for the first time in what feels like days, but she can’t remain. She won’t. Her sight hasn’t fully returned, and her head still swims with a need for food and drink and sleep, so she doesn’t notice the light spilling out ahead of her, though the sun has fallen back below the horizon. She knows this path. She has walked it a hundred times, and now she is going home.

(The last thing she remembers thinking is that she has an answer, doesn’t she? She was not put on Eora to die. She was put on Eora to _live_.)


End file.
